Even after he has announced his resignation, Fox is still painting Attorney General Eric Holder as “too black.”
Fox has been race baiting Holder forever and there seems to be no sign of letting up just because Holder plans to resign. If anything, Holder’s announcement seems to be an excuse to revive the racial and other attacks. At least, that was the case on Fox News Sunday last weekend.
Host Chris Wallace got the Holder bashing going via a Facebook question that just happened to get chosen to be read on the air as part of the introduction to the panel discussion on Holder’s resignation:
WALLACE: We asked you for questions for this august group, and we got this about Eric Holder on Facebook from Shelly Devous. She writes—you can’t close the chapter on his legacy until multiple investigations are concluded. Fast & Furious, IRS, others, those outcomes will impact his legacy.” George, Holder’s Justice Department is where investigations of the Obama administration went to die. So, how do you answer Shelly?
Panelist George Will began by saying, “Well, there’s good and bad” in Holder’s record. The good, according to Will, is that Holder “raised important issues about the criminal justice system, mass incarceration, excessive penalties.” Also, Will said, the DOJ, “to their great credit,” did not “involve the war powers resolution” to bomb Libya. Then Will said:
The bad is, first, his monomania about race and the idea that we’re a nation of cowards, because we won’t talk about it. We talk about little else, so far as I can tell.
Really? Little else? Just in the last two weeks of September, I found remarks by Holder on the subjects of bullying, financial fraud protections, child sexual abuse online, and more. If Will thinks Holder only talks about race, maybe it’s because Will only only pays attention to Holder about race.
The other Fox News contributor on the panel was Brit Hume. He suggested Holder “seemed to be on one side” of race issues. Can you guess which side that was?
HUME: I don’t think an attorney general needs to be blinded as Ben Carson suggested, but I do think an attorney general should be neutral in application of the law, so that people trust the attorney general in much of the way you would trust—you would want to trust a judge. I don’t think a lot of people feel that way about Eric Holder, and I think they have a right not to. From the comments that George mentioned about, you know, the United States, being a nation of cowards on race, to an array of other instances, in which he seemed to be on one side of it, he is totally, for example, on one side of the issue that has to do with voter identification, which is a legitimate concern. Ballot security is a valid concern. You wouldn’t know that from hearing from Eric Holder. To him, it’s all voter suppression. And these are the kinds of things that I think have led to widespread distrust of him, and deservedly so.
In reality, Hume is the one misrepresenting the voter ID situation. While Fox has long salivated over restricting the right to vote in the name of protecting us against voter fraud, the actual crime of voter fraud is exceedingly rare. Much rarer than cases of disenfranchisement of legitimate votes as the result of voter ID laws.
Furthermore, if Fox really cared about voter fraud, they wouldn’t keep hosting Ann Coulter without a concern for her own disreputable history of voting where she doesn’t live.